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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6684854" data-attributes="member: 4937">Agency is the power to try; not the right to succeed.  It guarantees you some right to shape the fiction, but not unlimited right.  If you want unlimited right to shape the fiction, you should become a novelist and not a gamer.   Because it is a game we are playing, it is ultimately about struggle and striving.  If you want self-validation, write fan fiction instead.As a GM, when new PC's are introduced into the game, I first talk with the player about what they want to achieve, and then we discuss how to get there mechanically.  A player that wanted to build a mighty warrior, but then allocated character building resources in a way that made that difficult, is at best confused.  But their agency isn't actually being effected here.  They still made all the choices, including the choice to make a character who had the delusion he was well suited to being a warrior.  The resulting game would probably play out that delusion, and that might not satisfy the player, but they actually made the choices that got them there.I don't even understand what you are trying to say.  The character is easily bluffed.  A successful Sense Motive check resisting Bluff means that you receive the positive affirmation that a character using Bluff is indeed lying to you.  A successful Sense Motive check versus DC 20, potentially gives you the positive affirmation that a character that isn't using Bluff is in fact being honest.   A player with an 8 WIS character and no ranks in Sense Motive does not receive these positive affirmations because he is easily bluffed.  Whereas, a player whose character has many ranks of Sense Motive receives this additional information all the time and can react accordingly, because he is not easily bluffed.Failing a sense motive check versus a bluff check (normally) tells a player nothing.  All he knows is that his character has no reason to believe that the person speaking to them does not believe what they are saying, and that he has no reason to believe that the person speaking to them has an ulterior motive.  What the player makes of that and how they roll play their PC in response is up to him and his interpretation of how his character would act under these situations.  It's not my job to tell the player how to play his character 'properly' as if the player character was actually my character and I had more insight into the character than the player did.   If the player decides that the NPC speaking to him is being perfectly sincere because he's actually completely insane, and RPs according, that's the player's decision.   If the player decides that his character is taken in, the player also decides what his character would do if he was taken in.  It's not my job as the DM to tell a player, "Look.  Your character was taken in by the NPC's bluff.  You now have to do what he says.", because first that it is not how an RPG usually works, second because PC's are specifically called out as immune to this sort of thing, and third because that's not even how bluff works against NPCs (barring a result of 50+ on your bluff check).  There are some limited exceptions to the right of a player to play his character fully, most notably in a fantasy setting mind controlling or effecting magic or in a horror game how they react to terrifying things, but even then if a DM abuses these exceptions its a violation of the social contract and bad game mastery.As for the rest of where you are going with this, I'm going to break some bad news to you.  There is a fundamental difference between mental abilities and physical abilities.  In the case of physical abilities, it is very easy to ensure that the physical ability of the player is not present in the game world because the player is not physically present within the imagined game space and his physical ability can easily be made to have no impact on the proposition->fortune->resolution cycle of the game.  But in the case of mental abilities, it is impossible to ensure that the mental ability of the player is not present in the game world because the player is in fact mentally present within the imagined game space and his mental ability inevitably has impact on the proposition->fortune->resolution cycle of the game.  And this isn't even the bad news.  The bad news is that this is a good thing, and we wouldn't want it any other way.  If the player wasn't in fact mentally present in the game, and his mental ability - his knowledge, his will, and his personality - could not impact the imagined game space, then the player would literally have no agency.  He'd be reduced to the role of a computer, helping to carry out the processing for the world's slowest artificial intelligence.But what this does mean is that we must kill the delusion that there is somehow a perfect and clean separation between the game and the metagame.  The fiction is never actually real, because it is a fiction.  A person can never fully pretend to be a person that they are not, nor ever fully have their decisions not be informed by who they are even if that was desirable.  It also means that you are presenting not only a false choice when you say, "My simple preference is either we have mechanics for these matters, in which case we live within these mechanics (with some decisions on just how much impact they have and how long they last) or we remove the mechanics.", but an impossible choice.  We can't actually choose to take the player out of the game and leave it all up to the character.  Apart from the player, the character doesn't exist.What we can do is have mechanics that are like the described Sense Motive mechanic, where a player is fed clues regarding the honesty of an NPC.  But we can't do the converse, and insure that a player with very high perceptiveness doesn't get fed clues through the metagame.  A high perceptive player cannot turn off his keen insight, nor can he successfully pretend to not have these insights even if he wanted to, because one can never know exactly what the counterfactual case is really like.  Even if the player wanted to pretend to be clueless, he could only guess at what it would really be like.  He could never be accurate about it.First, 'it's not fair' is not a very strong complaint.  It's not fair that some people are charismatic, and some or not, and some are perceptive and some or not, and some are athletic and others disabled, and some are capable of tremendous feats of reasoning and some struggle with basic math and logic.  So it would be hardly surprising if there were many things about the game we couldn't make perfectly fair in the sense that you mean it.  We can make a game balanced, but we can't easily make chess a fair game in the sense that it doesn't matter who plays it.  (And for that matter, would we want to do so?  We could imagine such games, but they would quickly bore us precisely because they lacked any struggle and striving and therefore any agency.)But fortunately, at least in this particular situation, we don't have to actually say any of those things.  What I as the DM can say to the shy stuttering wallflower that wants to play a character with 20 Charisma, is that to some extent they are going to need to come out of their shell and speak up and engage the NPCs if they are to make full use of that 20 charisma resource that their character has.  But if they speak up and role play and specify the sort of thing that they are saying, that the mechanics of the game will guarantee more often than not that however lamely they say things, however unpolished their speaking, however much they stutter, however uncharismatic they are, that those real words will be transformed in the game world into what would have been polished, forceful, appropriate, or suave and will be perceived by the NPC in that fashion.  What those mechanics however can never do for them, is tell them when they should try to bluff, or persuade, or intimidate, or seduce or command or give insight into the particular approaches that would be especially effective against a particular NPC.  It's up for them to choose the path and the approach in the same fashion its up to a player of a character with a good climb score to choose the wall to climb.  All I can promise is that whatever path they choose, they'll succeed more readily and more often than the characters without those resources.  (But, if you try to climb up an overhanging wall of ice covered polished obsidian, don't be surprised if you are beaten to the top by the plate  wearing DEX 8 cleric that used a ladder.)In like manner, if a player with innately high charisma chooses to play a thug with very low charisma, he can play the character as posh and suave all he likes, but through the mechanics of the game more often than not his pretty and powerful words will be transformed in the imagined space of the game into sounds that are awkward, pompous seeming, and grating and people will generally ignore and dislike his character anyway.   I can't however remove from the player his skilled social judgment in knowing what sort of things one should say and when, or when silence is the better part of being likeable.  Nor for that matter can or even ought the player do so, though perhaps they can if they are skillful RPers envisage how their character comes off and try to act in a manner that foreshadows the likely fortune.  And in doing so, because that requires tremendous skill and intelligence, they'll only impress the DM and the other players more, and so I'm not sure that even then you can really divorce that person from their charisma ever no matter how they play.   Indeed, I know for certain that it's not possible for a player who is not funny, to successfully roleplay a character that is.  So life isn't fair, and don't expect a mere game to change that.Ok, sure.  So what?  If you are really serious about social mechanics carrying most of the work of deciding how NPC's respond, why would it be necessary to double down on an 8 CHR by purposefully being a jerk all the time?   A lot of the time it is more skillful and more mature role playing to take mechanical cues and roll play the character in response to the fortune.  But a character with low charisma is by no means necessarily a jerk or even unlikeable, and it's actually unsophisticated RP to act as if that is what 8 charisma meant.   And if we aren't leaning on the social mechanics, then in point of honest fact there is no way a charismatic person even trying to play someone without charisma can succeed, as the best they will manage is a lovable oaf, or a powerfully effecting jerk, or someone that you palpably loathe,  or a sympathetic goof, or something else because in acting they will inevitably bring their tremendous stage presence to the part.   That's why when making a movie you don't hire bad actors to play unlikeable low charisma characters.   There is a difference in playing a character that arouses the audiences pity, and being an actor that arouses the audiences pity.   And life isn't fair.</blockquote>

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